Do your high-potentials see their development as a privilege or a right?

When the stakes are high and the pressure is on, players and leaders are often unable to handle the stress and the intensity of the game.

Leadership lessons from the man who transformed the U.S. Navy into the most powerful naval force the world has ever seen.

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I’m going to show you some numbers. And you’re going to want to see them sitting down. No, really. They’re going to be hard to believe. You’re going to see how small wastes get BIG very quickly. Specifically, I’m going to show you how minutes of wasted time turns into dozens, even hundreds, of employees not adding value, essentially NOT working. Wonder why you’re all so busy but never make any real progress? This could be one answer. But, first, let me ask you a question. How much time, on average, do you think people waste a day at work? When I say waste, I don’t mean people fooling around, i.e., not working. It’s them trying to work but problems and inefficiencies getting in the way of accomplishing it. For example, fixing other people’s mistakes, searching for information or rebooting a computer because it froze (again!). Think about how much time you’re forced to waste every day. Write that number down. Waste Starts Small Okay, here come the numbers; don’t freak out. I’ll walk you through it. Let’s take a company with 1,000 employees (that’s the number in the white box at top) and let’s assume employees work 230 days a year (that’s the number below 1,000). That’s the days in a year minus weekends, federal holidays and four weeks of PTO. In the lower half, the first column at left is the time, in minutes, that an individual employee is forced to waste every day trying to get work done. You can enter and compare up to four values. In this case, I entered 1 minute a day, 15 minutes a day, 30 minutes a day and 60 minutes a day. Minutes Become Hours The next column calculates the total HOURs those minutes grow to for the entire organization meaning all 1,000 employees in this case. One minute of daily waste per person equals 3,833 HOURS a year for the entire organization. 60 minutes or one hour of daily waste per person equals 230,000 HOURS of waste. The third column translates those wasted hours into full-time equivalent employees. In this case, 57,500 hours equates to 31 full-time employees. And 230,000 hours equates to 125 employees. So, if everyone is being forced to waste 60 minutes a day, it’s like 125 just performing wasteful activities, not getting ANY work done at all. That’s mindblowing! Increase Headcount? LMAO! If you walked into your company president’s office with a personal req to increase headcount by 125 people, what are the chances they’d agree and sign it? My guess is infinitesimal. They would require almost insurmountable justification. But, how easy is it at your company to make a work process more complex and burdensome? My guess is it’s VERY easy. Add another reviewer or approval signature to a requisition. Move a printer across the building. Create a new form to fill out. No big deal, right? WRONG! Add five minutes of waste to everyone’s day and it’s like you laid off 10 people. Estimate Your Company’s Waste How much waste did you estimate for your company? More than one hour? If you wrote down hours, then multiply by 60 to get minutes. Download my Lean Waste Calculator, input your numbers and estimate the impact. Believe me, it’s going to be much bigger than you ever imagined. Ask your work colleagues how much time they waste in a typical day, enter it in the spreadsheet and see the impact. So, now what? There are three common responses to this information, one of which is completely wrong. Stay tuned and next week find out more. Let’s Ride! Todd Hudson, Head Maverick The post Small Wastes Get BIG Quickly appeared first on Maverick Institute.

  In last week’s post, my Lean Waste Calculator showed you how the minutes that employees are forced to waste to accomplish work quickly turn into thousands of hours for the organization as a whole. These equate to full-time employees NOT adding value and the numbers get mindblowingly big. What was the impact of the number you estimated for your company? What was the reaction of people you shared this with?  I’d love to know. Email me at todd@maverickinstitute.com. So, you now know there’s a lot of wasted time and people in your organization. What happens next? Companies follow one of three paths. Path 1: Cajole and Admonish Execs and middle managers tell people to be more efficient, use their time wisely and not waste resources. This message might come through an email or be one topic at a departmental or all-company meeting. This is path completely ineffective and, frankly, pisses people off. They know they can’t do much to improve efficiency just by trying. They don’t control the business processes and resources. They can’t make the changes needed to eliminate waste. After the email or meeting, the topic never comes up again. This path is seen as (more) proof that management doesn’t know what’s really going on and isn’t serious about improvement. Path 2: Layoffs and…What? Some executives see these numbers as a rationale for layoffs. Instead of cutting waste, they cut people. They think with fewer resources work processes will naturally become more efficient. LOL! In your dreams! The remaining people still have to deliver products and services to customers on-time using the same wasteful processes as before, but now with fewer resources. They don’t have time to learn new problem-solving skills let alone stop and actually make improvements. They’re staying evenings and coming in on weekends just to keep up. This path results in more mistakes, thus even more waste, and lower morale. Path 3: Systematically Eliminate Waste Smart execs see these numbers as a challenge to work on every day. They create an environment and culture where employees can systematically reduce waste using Lean thinking and methods. People doing the work know what drives them crazy and wastes their time. They’re thrilled to get involved and make improvements! Just like with waste, small improvements get BIG quickly. Saving everybody 15 minutes a day is the equivalent of getting 31 employees back working productivity. WOW! With these additional hours and heads, organizations make even more improvements and create additional customer value. It’s the start of a ‘virtuous cycle’ of improvement. In addition, smart managers make it incredibly difficult to change processes to be more complex and burdensome. The hurdles to do this should be higher than hiring additional people. Remember, adding five minutes of waste to everyone’s day is like laying off 10 people. No one can afford that today. Drive business processes to be simple and visual. Let’s Ride! Todd Hudson, Head Maverick The post Cutting Out Waste (or Cutting Your Own Throat?) appeared first on Maverick Institute.

While eLearning has taken the enterprise world by storm, that are still many businesses weighing the pros and cons of investing in an online learning strategy. This is especially true for small and medium-sized companies, as, on a first look, eLearning appears to be something that only big corporations with thousands of employees have a need for. It’s also true, however, for many established big businesses working in less tech-savvy, more conservative industries. Then again, if you’re reading this, it means that you already want to know more about the benefits of online employee training, and how a modern LMS platform like TalentLMS can assist in the success of your business. Which, coincidentally, is exactly what we’re going to cover in this post. 1. Time is money In today’s knowledge economy, where time to market is everything, online learning emerged as a faster and more effective method of business training, compared to traditional classroom-based training. Because online training can be performed at the time that’s most convenient for each individual learner, it helps businesses minimize training-related disruptions to their daily workflows. When, for example, workload increases or some important business deadline looms, your training schedule should change to accommodate your business needs. With scheduled seminars this can be a real hassle — with online learning it’s as easy as it gets. TalentLMS gives you all the tools you need to implement an on-demand learning experience - tools that allow employees the freedom to study at their own pace, and from their own preferred location. And with the TalentLMS mobile application (available for iOS and, soon, Android), this freedom extends to learning (and microlearning) on the go — whether that’s during an employee’s daily commute or on a flight to some business meeting. 2. Money is money From the inevitable cost of renting some space for your training activities (or devoting some of your existing office space), down to printing out leaflets and hiring the appropriate number of instructors , traditional, classroom-based learning incurs some significant costs that aren’t very amenable to economies of scale. That’s why, whether you’re a small, medium or large company, online learning can help you cut down on your training costs. With a single Cloud-based TalentLMS account for example, you could train anything from 5 to 50.000 employees, and all with a predictable per-employee cost that you can know in advance and budget for. 3. It’s easy to manage If your company is of a certain size and above, and you have ever tried to organize a traditional in-person training program, especially one involving multiple departments and or facilities, you probably already know how easy it is for it to turn into a logistical nightmare. With online learning, not so much. With a modern LMS like TalentLMS, for example, you have complete oversight over all of your training program, from course programming to employee registration, and from course attendance reports to learner performance statistics. Plus, with TalentLMS "Branches" feature, you can even run separate, but centrally managed, training programs per team, department or facility. Oh, and with TalentLMS being Cloud-based, there are also no difficult installation steps or configuration that you have to go through. All you need is to register for a new TalentLMS account, add your content and users, and Bob’s your uncle. 4. Perfect for Employee Onboarding For a lot of companies, their employee onboarding process is an ad-hoc mess. And yet, employee onboarding (also known as "employee orientation"), is one of the most important factors in increasing productivity and minimizing employee churn rate. Plus, with today’s demanding compliance rules and employee certification laws, a fully compliant orientation course can be quite complicated to design and execute. Unless your onboarding process is implemented with a modern LMS platform, that is. TalentLMS, for instance, will help you write original orientation material, incorporate existing content (from Word documents and PDFs to video and presentations), and even directly buy and deploy professionally-made third party content (through its always-accessible integrated content marketplace). What’s better, you’ll be able to adapt, improve, and re-use the same courses again and again, for each new generation of hires. Last, but not least, TalentLMS’ support for compliance training (complete with certificates and pre-requisites) makes developing a compliance training strategy really easy, regardless of the industry you’re in. 5. Knowledge retention Another unsung benefit of eLearning is knowledge retention. The term sounds fancy, but the idea is quite simple: there are lots of procedures, steps, tips and tricks needed for the day-to-day operation of your company. Things ranging from how to properly fulfill orders to a particular big customer’s satisfaction, to keeping your website running properly. If your business is like most companies, each of those tasks is handled by a handful of employees, with parts of them frequently only known to some single senior employee. This means that if that employee ever moves on, quits or gets fired, there will be some disruption to your business, while somebody else picks up their tasks and learns how to do them properly. Any money or time saving tricks these ex-employees have used might even get lost altogether. TalentLMS can help you keep all that knowledge in the company by providing an easy way to transfer employee knowledge (including all that valuable on-the-job experience) into a central repository, formalize it, and use it to educate new employees. Of course this takes some effort — you have to ask your more experienced employees to write down any non-standard domain knowledge they acquired over the years, and especially any custom procedures they discovered to get the job done faster and better. What you get out of this though, will definitely be worth it. And not just for the knowledge retention aspect, but also because formalizing how your company and employees actually operate will also give you the opportunity to rethink your company’s procedures, discard some deprecated procedures, and improve upon others. 6. It grows with you Whether you are a small local company or a large multinational enterprise, online learning can both accommodate your needs today, and scale to meet your future needs. After all, a small business doesn’t stay small forever. Just consider that Apple and HP were "small businesses" once upon a time too. As your company grows, your LMS will grow in importance with it and will pay for itself many times over. And remember, growing implies hiring new people — and all these people will need both onboarding and training for their new roles. As for larger businesses, well, they always expand to new markets, open new facilities and diversify into other industries. Those things are par for the course if you want to stay competitive. With a Cloud-based LMS like TalentLMS there are no large upfront costs or restricting fine-print: you only pay for as many employees you need to train, and you can grow to how ever many learning portals and employees you want. That’s why over 30.000 organizations of all sizes, from cPanel to LG and Telerik, trust TalentLMS for their employee training needs. 7. It’s not that big a decision One thing keeping businesses from adopting online learning in the past was that a corporate LMS used to cost serious coin, and often needed a dedicated IT department to set it up and keep it running. Nowadays, and especially thanks to the Cloud, deploying your own corporate training program can be as simple as signing up for Facebook. TalentLMS, for one, has been renowned for its ease of use, and has often been praised by users and industry experts as a powerful, yet intuitive online learning platform, even winning several awards as the best on its category. The best thing is that TalentLMS’ Cloud-based solution and simple pay-per-learner pricing scheme has removed all barriers to adoption. Which means that even if you’re not immediately planning on deploying an LMS, we suggest you to try and take TalentLMS for a test drive. It’s a no-brainer, and you might find out that you really need one. The post 7 Reasons Why an LMS Is Necessary For Business Success appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.

While learning management systems like TalentLMS have made deploying, managing and running your online training easier than ever, there’s still one aspect of the whole process that remains quite challenging: Creating great content in the first place. Sure, TalentLMS makes it easy to upload existing content of all kinds, incorporate multimedia, format it for online and mobile delivery and all that. But coming up with original content for your courses? That’s up to you. Or at least it was, until, some time ago, we introduced the TalentLMS Marketplace, giving you an easy way to expand your curriculum with professionally created courses at the click of a button. Enter the Marketplace Two years later, the TalentLMS Marketplace has advanced quite a bit from its humble beginnings. In fact, since its launch we’ve seen a 10 fold increase in both the number of courses offered and the sales volume. To put some numbers behind these claims, the TalentLMS Marketplace catalog, initially populated by 20 high quality courses from our Australia-based partners Skills Maintenance, now boasts over 240 courses. And with over 10 content categories, there’s something for everyone too, from First-Aid and Allergen Awareness lessons, to Office Ergonomics and Environmentally Sustainable Work Practices. Content a-plenty Our two most popular (and populated) TalentLMS Marketplace categories are "Business Skills" and "Safety". Just to give you a quick idea of the content on offer, the "Business Skills" category includes courses in general leadership topics, like "Conflict Resolution" and "Team Building", more task-focused lessons, such as "Conducting Effective Performance Reviews", "Inventory Management", "Customer Service Basics", and courses focusing on important onboarding and HR themes, for example "Disability Awareness", "Bullying in the Workplace", "Professional Ethics", and more. As for the "Safety" category, it offers courses for the most common professional safety topics and operational best practices, including compliance courses covering mandatory training in industries like aviation, shipping and construction. For example "Asbestos Awareness", "Work safely in the construction industry", "Excavator Training", and many, many more. Prices vary according to the depth and breadth of the material covered, ranging from a low-ish $10 to over $200 for certain more advanced units, with a median price of around $40. Considering all the work needed to design, write and put together such a course on your own, even the higher priced courses are an absolute bargain for enterprise training use — and doubly so if you’re running an eLearning portal that’s reselling those courses to students. Sell Your Wares With Us Of course, our Marketplace is not just open for content buyers, but for content providers too. We’ve grown from our initial collaboration with content provider Skills Maintenance, to featuring content from a plethora of professional content development companies, including LearnMe, ProvidentSolutions, CPAI, BestArabi, UFTC, Digital Marketing Mentor, VETiS and more — but we can always use more content. For a quick introduction into how the Marketplace operates, from the perspective of both the seller and the buyer, watch this informative video below. Key take-aways: 1) you need a Stripe account to request a course addition, 2) courses have to be approved before they appear in the Marketplace, 3) our commissions are competitive, and are paid immediately to the seller, with no waiting period, 4) we ensure that nobody unlicensed can clone and take advantage of your material. If you’re a eLearning content vendor and are interested in adding your courses into the TalentLMS Marketplace, please contact us at support@talentlms.com and we’ll be glad to help you. Shopping therapy at the TalentLMS Marketplace From the buyer’s standpoint, things could not be easier. After you login as an TalentLMS administrator, you can visit the TalentLMS Marketplace either from your Dashboard (Courses -> Marketplace), or from the "Go to" dropdown menu. Once there, you see all the available courses, which you can filter by category, search, order by price, name, or date, read a brief description (or click on the course to see further details) and finally purchase a license. As soon as a course has been bought, it is added to your TalentLMS portal and you can assign it to your learners just like you would a regular course. You can also extend the course with new content of your own, or, if you’re into eCommerce, sell it for a different price to your learners. Conclusion The TalentLMS Marketplace gives you a turn-key solution to training your employees or adding new courses to your eLearning portal. With over 240 courses, and more to come, covering essential business skills, work ethics and safety issues, and compliance training topics, TalentLMS Marketplace courses can enhance and extend any corporate training scenario. The post Open 24/7: get quality new courses anytime with TalentLMS’ Marketplace appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.

Whoever we are, we are still an immature organization. In 2015, RMA researched and built five job benchmarks from the Training Magazine Top 125companies. We were able to benchmark five roles. What we also discovered is that these roles are defined very differently in each company. The Hoffman and Thurber e-book found the roles are also combined into one job:Most L&D departments have fewer than 10 team members and only 13% had more than 50 people in their department. On average, L&D professionals are responsible for 4 tasks and 3 different roles.  Most of these jugglers are responsible for an audience of greater than 1000 learners each year.   To legitimize and honor the sacred work that we in L&D do (growing people to grow performance), we must do the following:  Get to the table and influence higher in the company.  Learn and align to the organizations' strategy, priorities and gaps and present a proposal to intervene to a C Level Executive.  Sell High, Sell Often, Sell Alignment. Yes, you must sell.  Refuse to deliver L&D solutions without metrics and sponsorship. Just say No. Then say, ... and this is how I can help.Look at each performance gap as a system. Make sure you are intervening in the entire scope of the program. Fixing one side of the organization without the other will always cause side effects that aren't good. What boundaries are required to meet the performance goal? Don't start until all stakeholders have agreed to the metrics and how / when they will be measured. Don't be biased to one delivery medium of L&D. Do not let technology limit learning. Let the opportunity drive the implementation of the solution. Everything is 'blended' now.   Learn to be strategic not reactive. Step up when you see a chance to grow performance. Be a squeaky wheel. Find a better place to work if you can't do it where you are. Leverage the 'Engagement' mantra. Sell your services by authentically explaining that engagement comes from context (why?) and valued contribution. Employees want to contribute and grow with appropriate opportunities clearly laid out. Creating a learning intervention is a project; it begins and ends. Driving performance is a process- it never ends. Clearly explain this to your sponsors. The difference matters and they must support the entire life cycle. Other people can teach. You don't have to go to the School of Education. Leverage SMEs and help them learn to teach others. Broaden your reach. Each learner is unique and deserves respect. Learning for them is different than learning for someone else. Build a broad spectrum of learning options and let the learner choose. The bigger the learning buffet, the better. Performance is the Holy Grail. Talk about it. Demand it. Measure it. Just to be explicit - attendance (aka butts in seats) is not a performance metric. Teach Less, Learn More. It's not about you, it's about the learner's performance. Get out of their way and encourage self-discovery.  Another way to learn what this white paper has to say is to attend a free webinar on June 9 at 1 PM ET for a 30 minute overview with Jennifer and Brad. Register here.

Have you seen the movies Apollo 13, Splash and A Beautiful Mind? How about the TV series Arrested Development, 24 and Empire? Do you know what ties them all together? What makes them all similar and somehow connected?Source: OWN - Oprah Winfrey NetworkAll of them are credited to award-winning Hollywood producer Brian Grazer. But more importantly, these films and TV series were a result of Grazer's "curiosity conversations." 'Curiosity Conversations' to Expand LearningGrazer defines curiosity as the "process of asking questions, genuine questions, that are not leading to an ask for something in return." The goals of a "curiosity conversation" is to learn an insight or the secret to someone's process or success and expand each other's lives. Courtesy of : Super Soul Sunday | Oprah Winfrey Network"Curiosity conversations" are basically informal discussions that Grazer had and is still having with individuals outside of the entertainment industry and which became the inspiration behind his creations.Tips to Integrating 'Curiosity Conversations' in eLearningAsking questions is a manifestation of one's curiosity. But other than proving someone has a thirst for learning, curiosity, or more specifically the asking of questions, is the oil we need to keep us going. Humans have been called the "ultimate learning machines," and as with any machine, we need to be maintained to continue working efficiently.How do trainers or designers trigger curiosity in learners? Here are some suggestions:1. Ask story questions In story-based elearning, story questions are powerful tools that stimulate learners to connect or relate new learning to their existing storehouse of experiences and memories. Asking what, where, when, why, and how questions-queries that can't be answered by yes or no-grants learners permission to open up or share their insights.2. Have curiosity conversations In line with asking story questions, elearning professionals can try using Grazer's "curiosity conversations" to dive deep into the minds of each other to spur the creation of new ideas or simply to gain insights and new learning.3. Provide an "exploration bonus" Although everyone has a baseline curiosity and curiosity itself is an intrinsic motivation, it might take more than a little bit of courage for learners to give in to it because that would mean going outside of their comfort zone. However, trainers and designers can give learners a little push by taking a leaf out of the evolution theory and provide an "exploration bonus" to learners. Reward learners for trying something new.ConclusionCuriosity is a trait which is in all of us. It's important for trainers and designers to be able to trigger or stimulate learners' interest since curiosity makes learning easier and fun for them.ReferencesTom Stafford (June 19, 2012). "Why are We Curious?". BBCGrubber, Matthias, et al. (October 2014). States of Curiosity Modulate Hippocampus-Dependent Learning via the Dopaminergic Circuit. Neuron.Tip #15 - How to Add Curiosity in eLearning StoriesTip #28 - Create Memorable Story-based Test QuestionsTip#42 - Provoking Learners with Story QuestionsRay Jimenez, PhDVignettes Learning"Helping Learners Learn Their Way"Ray Jimenez, PhD Vignettes Learning Learn more about story and experience-based eLearning